Colin Cowherd Says Not to Make Shedeur Sanders a Victim After Draft Fall

Ryan Phillips | Apr 30, 2025

Deion Sanders (with his son Shedeur Sanders on the red carpet before Super Bowl LIX NFL Honors. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Colin Cowherd wants people to stop acting like Shedeur Sanders and his father Deion are victims after his excruciating fall in the 2025 NFL draft.

On Tuesday, Cowherd shared two stories about Sanders that may have helped explain his drop from potential No. 1 overall pick to fifth-round selection. On Wednesday he dove deeper into the fact that teams simply didn't seem interested in the Colorado quarterback.

Cowherd opened by saying the list of teams who wanted to take a quarterback early in the 2025 draft was short. It's clear in the aftermath that most QB-needy teams opted to wait until next year to find their franchise signal-callers. The 2026 draft is shaping up to be deep at the position.

There were a limited number of places for Sanders to wind up. When you add his bad interviews and the strong 2026 class, teams opted to stay away.

Cowherd then demanded we stop the narrative that NFL teams don't know what they're doing when selecting quarterbacks in the first round. He then listed off all the first-round picks who are currently starting quarterbacks in the league and, as you'd guess, it's virtually all of them.

"The truth is, in my life, overwhelmingly... they've all been first round picks," Cowherd said. "It's not easy to do this but stop making Shedeur and Deion Sanders the victim here. They're not. It's all really explainable."

"Stop making Shedeur Sanders and Deion the victim here. They're not."@ColinCowherd discusses the simple reason so many NFL teams chose to pass on Shedeur in the early rounds of the #NFLDraft. pic.twitter.com/Exc01EJowK

— Herd w/Colin Cowherd (@TheHerd) April 30, 2025

After being selected with the 144th pick in the draft, it's now on Sanders to prove Cowherd wrong.

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